Chris Lombardi puts defense and security under the spotlight, as he shares his takes on recent NATO and EU cooperation and provides insight into the company’s own long-term strategic partnerships in Europe.

Three trends are currently driving the global electricity sector: decarbonization, decentralization and differentiation. Utilities are making significant contributions to mitigate carbon emissions, while a technology revolution is …

No surprise as Lisbon process coincides with tunnel vision

BARELY noticed in the news coming out of last week’s EU summit – which, between the US election result, the Is-Arafat-Dead-Yet? speculation and a brutal murder in the Netherlands, was itself barely noticed – was the report issued by former Dutch prime minister Wim Kok on Europe’s economic growth prospects.

“If we don’t focus strongly on growth, productivity and employment, we will not provide the means to keep the social model,” Kok said in an interview with the International Herald Tribune following the publication of the report.

But stealing his thunder a bit was outgoing/incoming European Commission President Romano Prodi, who showed some newfound lucidity when telling the Financial Times that the Lisbon process “is a big failure”. He would know.

Elsewhere, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier pens what must be the most unusual op-ed column of the week, for the Wall Street Journal. He extends an olive branch across the Atlantic and asks for some understanding between France and the US.

“Because of all the things that connect us,” he writes, “I’m concerned about the campaigns against my country, and the recent surge of ‘French-bashing’. There’s a paradox here, since France is actually among your best friends in the fight against terrorism. More generally, I’m concerned to see both Americans and Europeans expressing doubts over the future of transatlantic relations, and I’m troubled to see that Europe is misunderstood, if not scorned, in the US. The European Union is changing.”

Barnier’s boss, meanwhile, has turned his attention to China, and this does not escape the notice of his country’s most important newspaper. Le Monde asks of Jacques Chirac’s Beijing entreaties: “But why does he do so much? With his strong support for the Chinese regime, Jacques Chirac gives the impression of going too far. Further, in any case, than is necessary to hope to become one of the privileged partners of a regime which combines repression and opening, reform and authoritarianism.”

And speaking of such regimes, lots of papers and wire services run possibly apocryphal accounts of Americans visiting Canada’s immigration website in droves – presumably because they want to leave the country as a result of George W Bush’s re-election.

“The website has 20,000 visitors on an average day, but after the election that number swelled to 115,016,” reports Bulgaria’s Sofia News Agency. “On Thursday, the figure was still higher than normal – almost 66,000.”

The feisty online journal Slate.com notes that “the possible Canadian monopoly on disaffected American emigrants prompted nervous Europeans to redouble their efforts to be the place disenchanted Americans go to die”.

Finally, from the News of the Weird file: the Associated Press reports on an Austrian artist who claims he is tunneling from Graz to a city in neighbouring Slovenia.

“Muhammad Mueller, who together with a friend launched the project Saturday in Graz, 120 miles south of Vienna, said he thinks digging the 42-mile tunnel to the Slovene border city of Gradec will take two people using shovels roughly 5,600 years.”

Austrian television called the project “probably the most long-term cultural project ever undertaken”. Except, of course, for the Lisbon process.

Craig Winneker is the editor of TCS-International (www.TechCentralStation.be) a Brussels-based website.